Geopolitics (for Encyclopedia of Globalization, edited by George Ritzer (Routledge, 2012)

George Steinmetz
1.What is Geopolitics? Historical shifts in meaning and contemporary definitions
The word geopolitics points to the interface between two distinct ontological realms and
scientific disciplines, geography and politics. The first of these root words, geography, is not
necessarily restricted in this context to traditional geographic concerns like climate or the earths
physical surface, but entails a much broader spatial perspective concerned with scale and
location, the size, shape, and boundaries of territories, and the processes by which territories are
socially defined. The other root word, politics, points toward subfields of political science like
international relations which are also focused on states and empires, borders and frontiers,
international alliances and polarizations, the balance and imbalance of global power, and war,
imperialism, and diplomacy (Burchill and Linklater 1996).
If geopolitics is delimited by the overlap between geography and politics, this definition
does not yet specify the nature of the relationship between the two realms. The founding decades
of geopolitical discussion saw an emphasis on geographical modes of explanation. Geopolitical
thinkers at the turn of the previous century emphasized the effects of physical geography and
spatial location on a states growth and decline and its military and foreign policies. The word
geopolitics was coined by the Swedish social scientist Rudolf Kjelln (1917: 46), who defined it
as the doctrine of the state as a geographic organism or a spatial phenomenon: i.e., the state as
land, territory, region, or, most precisely, as a Reich [realm, empire]. Kjellns thinking was
based largely on the work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who founded the subfields of
political geography and anthropo-geography as the study of the geographical basis of the states
action (Ratzel 1882, 1897). Ratzels American disciple Ellen Semple argued in her
programmatically entitled book Influences of Geographic Environment that the natural
environment was the physical basis of history (Semple 1911: 2). Geopolitical thinkers at the
turn of the century emphasized the effects of physical geography and spatial location on the
growth and decline of states and on military and foreign policies. British geographer Halford
Mackinder (1904: 422), another key founder of geopolitics, argued that the geographical
causation of politics was permanent, inescapable, and pervasive, and that control of the
inaccessible lands of the Eurasian pivot area (see figure 3) was the key to world supremacy.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Rear Admiral in the US Navy, developed an opposing argument about
the primacy of seapower and control of the sea. In a chapter on the general nature of
geographical influences, British historian H. B. George argued (1907: 7) that the destinies of
man are very largely determined by their environment, especially climate and the physical
features of the earth. The leading figure in the German geopolitical school from the early 1920s
until 1945, Karl Haushofer, defined the field as recognizing that the fundamental features
determined by the surface of the earth are the only lasting ones in international political
struggles (Haushofer 1924 [2002]: xxxiii). The editorial committee of Haushofers Journal of
Geopolitics (Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik) defined geopolitics as the science of political space
organisms (politische Raumorganismen) and their structures insofar as they are conditioned
by the earth (Haushofer, Obst, Lautensach, and Maull 1928, p. 27).
Contemporary treatments of geopolitics often contain echoes of these environmentallydeterminist origins. Heinz Brill defines geopolitics as the doctrine of the influence of
geographic space on the politics of a state (Brill 1998: 206; 1994: 21). A recent dictionary of
1

security studies defines geopolitics as the analysis of the influence of geographic conditions of a
state on its national and international policies (Meier, Rossmanith, and Schfer (2005: 144). The
Encyclopedia Britannica (n.d.) still defines geopolitics as analysis of the geographic influences
on power relationships in international relations. Even a Marxist geographer like David Harvey
(2003) conjures up an image of a conflict between one group of states trying to forge a Eurasian
bloc versus an American strategy of disrupting this alliance by cultivating allies in what
geopolitical thinkers used to call the East European shatterbelt (Trampler 1932) between
Europe and Russia, with the ultimate goal of preventing the first group of powers from securing
a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil.
Today the idea of geopolitics covers a broad semantic terrain that ranges between
geodeterminist and politicist extremes. At the geodeterminist pole we find Kjllens original
definition of geopolitics as the doctrine of the influence of geographic space on the form and
action of states and empires. At the opposite pole, geopolitics is a synonym for great power
politics. This second usage owes much to Henry Kissinger, who defined geopolitical
perspective as an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium, thereby
marginalizing spatial considerations (Kissinger 1979: 55; also 1994; Howard 1994), but it was
used in this way long before Kissinger (Coogan 1991: 5). Others soon began echoing Kissingers
influential usage, defining geopolitics simply as the art and the process of managing global
rivalry (Jay 1979: 486). Whereas the geodeterminist definition threatens to efface any
difference between geopolitics and political geography, the second definition is almost identical
to realist models of international relations, except that geopoliticians pay more attention to
territories, borders, and concrete locations, while realist models often treat space as entirely
abstract. The modal definition understands geopolitics as the analysis of all relations between
space, on the one hand, and organized forms of political domination, contestation, and alliance,
on the other (Meier, Rossmanith, and Schfer 2005: 144). Pierre Gallois (1990: 37) exemplifies
this modal definition, describing geopolitics as the study of relations between the conduct of a
politics of power oriented toward the international level and the geographic frame in which it is
carried out. The exact nature of the relationship between the two terms, their specific
mechanisms, causal powers, are relative importance, are left open in this image of a semantic
range.
Another feature of classical geopolitical discourse that resonates in contemporary
usages is the fields emphasis on practical political applications. For most of its history
geopolitics has been a science of the military staffs and security councils, though this has
started to change in recent years (Tunander 2008: 167). Geopolitics has never been an
exclusively or even a predominantly academic formation; the boundaries between scientific and
applied geopolitics have always been fluid. Even the word geopolitics is characterized by a
constitutive ambiguity insofar as it refers both to the object of analysis and to the science of that
object. The field of geopolitics has included both imperialist politicians and armchair
intellectuals. For Otto Maull (1926: 246), Hans W. Weigert (1942: 734), and Richard Hartshorne
(1960: 53), geopolitics was simply applied political geography. Indeed, the most famous
geopolitical thinkers, from Mahan, Mackinder, and Haushofer, through to Henry Kissinger,
Augusto Pinochet, Colin S. Gray, and Zbgniew Brzezinki, have all moved in and out of
academic settings and foreign policymaking. Even the university-based geopoliticians have
pursued political aims. Friedrich Ratzel called for changes in popular education in order to
promote awareness of planetary politics (Hell, 2011). And even though adherents of
contemporary critical versions of geopolitics have distanced themselves from the tradition of
2

providing advice to the prince (Dalby 1994), many direct their work toward an alternative set
of practical aims such as developing militant counter-strategies to militarism and imperialism
and supporting local and social movements or weaker nation-states against larger hegemons and
centralized powers. Some have tried to transform geopolitics into a theory of peace rather than
war (Hepple 2000; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004).
2. The sociology and contextual history of the development of Geopolitics
Analysis of the relations between geography and political power reaches back to Plato,
Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Strabo, and other writers in the ancient Greek and
Roman worlds (Gallois 1990: 141-144; Hartog 1978). Attention to the nexus of geography and
politics reemerged in Europe during the 18th century, partly as a result of the Enlightenment and
partly as a reaction against it. In Spirit of Laws (1748), Montesquieu conceived human life as a
reflection of geographical and climatic conditions (Collingwood 1946: 79). Herder connected
the uniqueness of each national culture to geography, for example, connecting the lack of inlets
and bays along the Chinese coastline to Chinas semi-Tartarish despotism (1784: 284).
Geopolitical modes of thinking were nourished by European exploration and imperialism and by
the exigencies of securing political control over conquered territories in far flung colonial
empires. With the completion of the westward continental expansion of the United States frontier
and the end of second wave of European colonial conquest, the idea of planetary thinking or
globalization emerged powerfully (Kearns 1984). Mackinder (1904) signaled the end of the
Columbian epoch of European expansionism. Geographic attention turned from explorations
of absolute space to interest in relative space, location, and scale. The idea that the entire globe
was now occupied by states and that events in the most far-flung parts of the globe would be felt
everywhere lend a renewed immediacy to geopolitical thinking. By the 1920s, geopoliticians
were discussing the emergence of what one of them labeled the global village (das Drfchen
Erde; Dix 1929)--decades before Marshall McLuhan re-coined that term (Murphy 1997: 50).
The evolution of geopolitical thinking has also responded to technological advances in shipbuilding and navigation (Livingstone 1993: 32ff.), aviation (Hochholzer 1930; Weigert and
Stefansson 1944), nuclear weapons (Zoppo and Zorgbibe 1983), radio (Billeb 1937), television
(Wenke 1938), and the internet (Douzet 1997).
There was also a growing sense after 1945 that geography was no as longer politically or
intellectually significant as it had been before. The new models of military and foreign policy
were no longer as likely to be rooted in concrete maps and categories of geographical space.
Although containment strategies actually took highly specific spatialized forms, the ideological
definition of the struggle between communism and capitalism tended to detach itself from
specific places (Mamadouh 1998: 238). As the United States emerged over the course of the 20th
century as the dominant global power, European colonial strategies and Eurasian models of
continental expansion began to seem outdated. Even in its efforts to exercise global hegemony,
the US tended to pursue non-territorial strategies which did not entail permanent occupation of
foreign countries (Steinmetz 2005b). The American overseas military and political presence was
pointillistic, taking the form of an empire of basis (Johnson 2004). As nonterritorial forms of
US imperial domination replaced European colonialism, specifically geographic approaches
began to seem less pertinent to understanding international relations. Murphy (2007) suggests
that the new model of American global hegemony rendered place differences increasingly
irrelevant and social science began to treat differences from place to place as noise in their
model-building efforts. Political scientists Przeworski and Teune (1970: 30) called explicitly for
3

replacing proper names of social systems by the relevant variables. Mamadou (1998) points to
improvements in communication technology and nuclear weapons as additional reasons for the
decline of geography after 1945.
Nonetheless, open or hot warfare, as Smith (2003:26) notes, has been good for
geography, and the same has been true of geopolitics. The most recent explosion of interest in
geopolitics accompanied the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This is an example of the way in
which geopolitical discussions have been shaped repeatedly by more punctual, world-political
events. The geopolitical analysis of borders and frontiers, for example, was inaugurated by
Ratzel after the German wars of unification (1866-1871) had redrawn the map of Europe. The
Berlin West Africa conference, convened by the German Chancellor in 1884-1885, signalled the
beginning of a 15-year period in which the European powers carved up Africa and the islands of
the Pacific and distributed them among themselves. Ratzels Political Geography, which is often
described as the founding text of geopolitics, described the political border as a dynamic, living
peripheral organ rather than a static line (Ratzel 1923, section 6). Ratzel explicitly linked the
mutability of international borders to the inherently expansive, warlike nature of the state and the
international system of states. This thematization of boundaries was given new urgency by the
massive realignment of European national borders following WWI. Some of the most politically
explosive changes in these boundaries were attributed to the American Haushofer, Isaiah
Bowman, the geographer who helped convince Woodrow Wilson to include a demand for Polish
independence in his Fourteen Points of 1918 (Smith 2003: 125). These territorial losses to
Poland were one of the central German grievances throughout the 1920s and played a huge role
in Nazi propaganda and, eventually, Nazi policy.
The frontier or border became, and has remained, a central theme in geopolitical writing
in Germany (von Loesch 1922; Haushofer 1927) and France (Ancel 1935; Febvre 1962;
Gottmann 1952, ch. 4, 1980; Raffestin 1974; Foucher 1980). According to Golcher (1927), the
border had to be considered a palpable and independent life form, an organism in its own right
rather than simply the skin of the state organism (Murphy 1997: 32). Ethnosociologists Max
Hildebert Boehm and Karl C. von Loesch founded the Berlin Institut fr Grenz- und
Auslandsstudien (Institute for the Study of Borders and Foreign Areas) in 1926 and published a
yearbook, Deutsches Grenzland (German Borderlands), which documented ongoing German
border struggles (Klingemann 1996, ch. 4; Boehm 1938).
Geopolitical planning sought to achieve informal hegemony over the Central European
greater economic space (Figure 1) or, even more ominously, to realign German state borders
with the much wider region of ethnic or racial Germandom, and eventually with the even wider
lands of what they understood as ancient German settlement (Jacobsen 1979: 257). The NaziSoviet pact and the German alliance with Japan were greeted by Haushofer, who accepted
Mackinders argument that control of the Eurasian pivot area would guarantee global domination
(Jacobsen 1979, vol. 1: 268). Haushofer was depicted in popular American publications like
Readers Digest and Life as the scientific genius behind Hitlers policies of attaining Lebensraum
(living space) through conquest, and many Americans became convinced that it was smart to be
geopolitical (in the words of Strausz-Hup 1943) or fas est ab hoste doceri (it is right to
learn even from the enemy), in Haushofers favored maxim, from Ovid ( Tuathail 1996: 130).
The US War Department created a Geopolitical Section inside the Military Intelligence service
in 1942 (Coogan 1991: 201-212). Soviet success in WWII led to the American containment
policies that were derived in part from Mackinders classic geopolitical theory. These policies
sought to control the rimlands of Eurasia, that is, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the
4

Middle East (Klare 2003: 54), thereby creating a buffer zone of allied states between the pivot
area and the Anglo-American crescent of sea power (see Figure 4).
The strong associations between geopolitical vocabulary and Nazism led to a
disappearance of geopolitical discussion in Europe and a vehement opposition to it in the USSR
after 1945. Carl Schmitts book The Nomos of the Earth, published in 1950, was fundamentally
geopolitical in inspiration, but Schmitt largely avoided geopolitical vocabulary, coining his new
concept of Nomos as an alternative and while also continuing to use the originally economic
category of Grossraum as an alternative word for a political sphere of hegemonic influence.
Schmitt had transformed the idea of Grossraum into a political concept during the Nazi years,
using it to describe a region of German political hegemony over Central Europe (see Schmitt
1941; Hell 2009; Ebeling 1994: 149-151). Explicit geopolitical discussions faded away in the US
somewhat later, during the early 1960s (Kristof 1961). In 1963 an American text on political
geography suggested that the revival of the term geopolitics is probably premature and may
remain so as long as most people associate the term with the Third Reich (Pounds 1963:
410). ). Sempa (2002: 103) notes the virtual eclipse of geopolitics in the American academic
realm from the late 1960s through the 1970s. But geopolitical ideas finally began to playe a
critical role in the evolution of American national security policy during and after the 1960s
(Coogan 1991: 11) and the doctrines reemerged in the 1980s. Geopolitical ideas also flourished
in the authoritarian states of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s: the future Chilean General
Augusto Pinochet (1968) published an introduction to geopolitics, journals called Geopoltica
appeared in Argentina and Uruguay, and the Revista chilena de geopoltica was created in 1984.
The next wave of explicit geopolitical discussion began in the 1980s in the wake of the
escalation of the nuclear confrontation between the US and USSR and the emergence of a new
intellectual right wing in Europe. A conservative International Institute of Geopolitics (Institut
international de gopolitique) was founded in 1983 in Paris. In response to the re-emergence of
conservative geopolitics, critical geographers associated with journals like Antipode, Political
Geography Quarterly (1982-present, renamed Political Geography in 1992), and Hrodote
attempted to capture the language of geopolitics for themselves. In Germany, where taboos on
geopolitical discourse were much greater, geopolitics reemerged following the collapse of
Communism. Some writers rediscovered theories of Germanys supposedly fateful Mittellage,
or intermediate location, at the center of Europe (Calleo 1978; Bassin 1996; Brill 1998;
Zitelmann, Weissmann, and Grossheim 1993). The German army created an Office for Military
Geo-ontology (Amt fr Militrisches Geowesen) in 1985, which merged into the Office for
Geo-information (Amt fr Geoinformationswesen) in 2003. According to its website, the areas
of specialization of this Office include Geopolitik; its yearbook (Jahresheft) is called
Geopolitik. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the American military responses to
those attacks intensified scepticism about overly sanguine theories of globalization and the flat
earth, inspiring a new wave of interest in geopolitics. Nowadays, universities in France, Britain,
India, and the Czech Republic offer degrees in geopolitics, and serious newspapers like Le
Monde use the language of geopolitics regularly. A French geopolitician even published a book
called Geopolitics for Dummies (La gopolitique pour les nuls; Moreau Defarges 2008).
One gauge of waxing and waning of geopolitics over time is the creation of journals with
geopolitics in the title. The first journal specifically devoted to geopolitics was the Zeitschrift
fr Geopolitik, which existed from 1924 to 1944. The Italian journal Geopolitica (1939-1942)
emulated the German model. After the creation of the Latin American journals mentioned above,
geopolitical discourse moved next to France, where the International Institute of Geopolitics
5

launched the journal Gopolitique in 1983. Hrodote, a journal that had existed since 1974,
followed suit and adopted the subtitle revue de gographie et de gopolitique (Journal of
Geography and Geopolitics) the same year. Since then France has seen the creation of several
new geopolitical journals, including LiMes: Revue franaise de gopolitique (1996-present) and
Outre-terre: revue franaise de gopolitique (2001-present). The 1990s saw the creation of the
British journal Geopolitics and International Boundaries, which changed its title to Geopolitics
in 1998. Journals of geopolitics appeared in Italy, Russia, and Cameroon (Limes: rivista italiana
di geopolitica, Russkii geopoliticheskii sbornik, and Enjeux: bulletin d'analyses gopolitiques
pour lAfrique central). Since 2004 new geopolitical journals have been founded in several
eastern European counties, including Bulgaria (Geopolitika & geostrategiia), Poland
(Geopolityka), and Serbia (Geopoliticki casopis). Interestingly, the two major countries in which
there are still no journals with geopolitical titles are the United States and Germany (with the
exception of the German Army yearbook mentioned above). In the US international relations has
largely filled the place of geopolitics in the universities, while geography declined overall as a
discipline, as discussed below. In Germany, Geopolitik since 1945 has been a word like race
(Rasse), one that many people continue to see as too strongly associated with the Nazi era to be
used in a neutral or scientific manner.
It is important to consider the field of geopolitics in sociological terms if we want to
understand its peculiar history. A sociological approach to an academic field involves looking
at its internal structure and differentiation and its relations to other disciplines and nonscientific
powers. In order to understand the gradual shift over the last century from a more geographic to a
more political emphasis within geopolitics, we need to consider the uneven development and
prestige of the two main constituent disciplines that have contributed to it, Geography and
Political Science. Political science emerged somewhat later than geography as a university
discipline, but it surpassed geography in status and size in the second half of the 20th century.
Academic geography grew out of 18th century learned societies such as the British Association
for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (founded in 1788) and the French
Socit de Gographie (founded in 1821). The first half of the 19th century saw the pioneering
work of university geographers like Carl Ritter and explorer-scientists such as Alexander von
Humboldt. University professorships specifically dedicated to geography were created starting in
1874 in Germany. By 1935 there were over 100,000 members of geographic societies worldwide
(Capel 1991; Robic 2003). Geographical interest flourished in the US and Europe during the two
world wars (Smith 2003). During the second half of the 20th century, however, academic
geography declined rather precipitously. Geography departments were closed in a number of
leading American universities, starting with Harvard in 1948 and followed by Columbia,
Michigan, Penn, Stanford, Virginia, Yale, and many others (Murphy 2007, note 1). In Germany,
geopolitical discussion was taboo (Brill 1998: 205) after 1945 and political geography was
also largely discredited.
Like geography, political science also had ancient precursors, and it emerged from a set
of established university disciplines such as Staatswissenschaft (state sciences) and
Cameralistics, History, Law, and Economics. The first formal departments and university chairs
of political science were created in the final decades of the 19th century in the United States, and
the number of colleges and schools offering courses in international relations increased
exponentially in the interwar period (Farr 2003; Coogan 1991: 55). In Germany, the first
institution of higher education dedicated specifically to political science, the Deutsche
Hochschule fr Politik, was founded only in 1920 (Bleek 2001; Behrmann 1998), and Political
6

Science did not become part of the established German universities until after 1945, partly as
result of the Allied military occupation (Pl 2001). The reputation of Political Science eclipsed
Geography in European and American universities during the second half of the 20th century.
The gradual shift in emphasis within geopolitics from an original focus on the
determination of politics by the geographic environment to a political determination of territory
and space is thus connected not only to developments in the world outside science but also to the
shifting balance of power between geography and political science. Another intra-scientific
reason for the decline of geopolitics after 1945 has to do with the growing prestige of
neopositivist, formalized, and mathematized forms of social science, especially in the United
States (Steinmetz 2005b). These approaches tended to abstract from place and space as well as
history, proposing universal models in a hypothetico-deductive format. The replacement of a
language of geopolitics by the language of international relations in American political science
was related not only to the rise of nuclear weapons and the informal character of US hegemony
but also to the increasingly powerful idea of a political science valid for all times and places
(Gunnell 1986).
Even if geopolitics has rarely existed as a university discipline, it did occasionally cohere
as a subfield within geography or political science (on the theory of subfields, see Steinmetz
2010a, 2010b, 2011). Geopolitical (sub)fields are usually dominated by their heteronomous
pole, that is, by participants and institutions oriented more toward political power and
policymaking that autonomous scientific production. In this respect geopolitics more closely
resembles social work or public policy schools than traditional disciplines like history,
philosophy, or even geography. The difference between political geography and geopolitics was
almost entirely defined in terms of the latters applied and heteronomous character, that is, its
dependence on political power. Moreover, geopolitics until recently was usually connected to
conservative political actors, perspectives, and policies; it was a science of and for empire which
flourished especially during wartime (A. Murphy 2004). In the history of geopolitics, politicians
and policy-oriented academics like Mackinder and Haushofer have tended to overshadow the
more autonomous, scientifically-oriented figures. Haushofer, a Bavarian General turned
professor, described geopolitics as a servant of the politically leading powers (1925: 93), A
recent discussion among four leading political geographers suggested that nonacademics still
tend to be drawn to the more geo-determinist concepts of classical geopolitics (A. Murphy
2004: 619, 621). By contrast, more autonomous geopolitical writers tend to emphasize the ways
in which geographical discourses and representations shape world politics and the ways states
and politics shape space and territory (e.g. Brenner 1997, 1998, 2002).
The social sciences have often shown marked national colorations (Heilbron 2008), and
this has perhaps been especially true of geopolitics, since it has been so closely linked to imperial
politics. As Hans Weigert (1942: 733) observed,
there is no such thing as a general science of geopolitics. It does not have a singular form. There are
as many [schools of] geopolitics as there are conflicting states.

According to the editors of the Handbook of Political Geography, this field was clearly, even
self-consciously subordinated to the statecraft of particular nation-states (Cox, Murray and Low
2007: 3; see also Cowen and Smith 2009: 25). The geopolitical approach itself suggests that
there must be a global geopolitics of the production of geopolitical knowledge. Theoretical and
analytic approaches will vary spatially not just because of national scientific and intellectual
traditions but because of the specific geopolitical stakes, conflicts, and regimes prevalent in each
specific state or empire.
7

Explaining geopolitical discourse in a sociological manner also requires that we pay

attention to the broader intellectual currents within which such discussions emerge. Geopolitics
was directed in part against Marxism (S. Neumann 1943: 287), as Karl Wittfogel (1929) argued
in a German Communist journal. Classical Geopolitics was a non-Marxist form of materialism
( Tuathail 1996: 17). Another intellectual current that had an enormous impact on early
Geopolitics was Social Darwinism, without which Ratzels concept of Lebensraum and his
theory of the state as an organism are incomprehensible. Environmental determinism, in this
respect, was the geographic version of 19th century Social Darwinism (Peet 1985). The first
generation of geopolitical thinkers was mainly influenced by the natural sciences. This
reinforced a tendency to make predictive forecasts on the basis of supposedly general
geopolitical laws.
After 1900 geopolitical thinking began to be influenced by the very different intellectual
formations of neo-historicism (Mannheim 1952) and antipositivism (Steinmetz 2005c), which
militated against any notion of general laws or strong predictions in the social sciences. Indeed,
scientific naturalism had never completed replaced historicism within German geography. Carl
Ritter (1862: 19; 1834) had described the earth as a cosmic individual, and ens sui generis,
insisting on the historical element in geography. The geographer Hzel (1896) discussed the
idea of the geographical individual. The phrase geographical individual harkened back to
Ritter, and resonated with philosopher Heinrich Rickerts concept of the historical individual
(Steinmetz 2010a). The German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband had argued that the
Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) like history had to be approached in a completely
different manner than the sciences of natural phenomena. The main differences concerned the
central role of interpretation in the human sciences and the idea of individualitythe irreducible
particularity of events, historical processes, institutions, and actors. Rickert, whose thinking had
a profound influence on Max Weber, argued that the historical individual was the typical
object of analysis in the human and social sciences. Max Spandau, a student of Max Weber and
Karl Haushofer, argued that geography is related to history in terms of the unique individuality
[Einmaligkeit] of its object and that geography was subject to historical explanations in the
sense in which this term has been used by H. Rickert because, like history, it is concerned with
the unique facts of existence (1925: 40). And as the migr sociologist Werner Cahnmann
noted, Spandau insisted that no general causal nexus should be implied in investigations into
historic or geographic individualities but should try instead to make a genuine historical
explanation showing that a unique complex of causes had brought forth a unique complex of
facts in a unique field situation (2007 [1942]: 146).
The rejection of a nomothetic approach to geopolitics was not confined to Germany.
French political geographers promoted a philosophical doctrine known as Possibilism, which
resembled German historicism in emphasizing the human capacity to choose between a range of
possible responses to the environment (Johnston 2000: 609). The leading geographical
representative of this view was Vidal de la Blache (1928: 14), who criticized Ratzels naturalism
and insisted that
a geographical individuality does not result simply from geological and climatic conditions. It is not
something delivered complete from the hand of Nature. It is man who reveals a countrys
individuality by moulding it to his own use.

An even stronger adherent of possibilism was Lucien Febvre, the co-founder with Marc Bloch
of the French Annales historiographic school. Febvre insisted that there are no necessities, but
everywhere possibilities (Febvre 2003: xi). The Scottish geographer and sociologist Patrick
Geddes also defended a form of possibilism and practiced a form of conservative surgery on
8

cities to make them more humane (Geddes 1947: 44-49). Even Mackinder saw geopolitical
events as singular, meaning that geopolitics was not a nomothetic science (Parker 1985: 26).
Isaiah Bowman attacked the geopoliticians insistence on geographic laws and their perverse
mixing of scientific laws with a Nietzschean politics of the will (Bowman 1942: 648-9).
Since the 1980s geopolitical discussions have been deeply influenced by neo-Marxism
and poststructuralism. The Marxist geographer David Harvey discussed the geopolitics of
capitalism and developed a partially geopolitical explanation of contemporary American
imperialism (Harvey 1985, 2003). Yves Lacoste promoted a critical analysis of geography as a
language and form of power/knowledge, emphasizing, for example, that the central geographic
notion of region derived from the Latin word regere, meaning to rule ( Tuathail 1996: 161,
163). Geopolitical writers influenced by Marxism and poststructuralism have analyzed the
geopolitical assumptions and mental maps that shape foreign policymaking (Henrickson
1980), deconstructing geopolitical models such as the view from nowhere, hierarchies of
place, and the distinctions between the inside-domestic and the outside-foreign (Agnew 2003).
Geopolitical writers have also responded to the newer discussions of globalization (Lacoste
2003; Dodds 2007).
3. The Development of the Main Geopolitical Arguments, Theories, and Themes
The beginning of geopolitics lies in a view of the state as a living organism whose territory is
not a definite area fixed for all time and which cannot be contained within rigid limits
(Ratzel 1896: 351). Ratzel started from the premise that every living organism required a
certain amount of territory from which to draw sustenance, and he notoriously labeled this
territory the respective Lebensraum, or living space, of the organism in question (Bassin 2003:
16). The word Lebensraum became infamous once it appeared in the pages of Hitlers Mein
Kampf and subsequently appeared to guide some of the Nazis wartime policies (Lange 1965).
Ratzels theory was a form of Social Darwinism, but in contrast to Darwins account, the
struggle took place among states rather than individuals. As a states population grows,
according to Ratzel, it requires a larger Lebensraum; and as more and more states grow up, the
nearer do they edge together, and act and react upon one another (Ratzel 1897: 297). There
is a natural tendency for states to engage in conquest and to expand: in the long run, nature does
not let a Volk remain immobile, it has to move forward or backward (Ratzel 1882, vol. 1: 116).
Since the earths surface was considered to be completely occupied by states by the end of the
19th century, the necessary corollary of spatial growth by some states was the annexation and
disappearance of other states. Ratzel argued that giant empires were both the starting point and
the culmination of world history. He also developed the Greco-Roman idea of the ecumene as the
inhabited part of the earth, and distinguished between core (Innenlage or Zelle) and peripheries
(Rnder) within that ecumene (Ratzel 1923: 205-208). This distinction between core and
periphery resurfaced in Alfred Webers (1929) industrial location theory, Christallers (1933)
central place theory, the three worlds model (Balandier 1956, Worsley), Wallersteins
(2004) world system theory, and many other discussions of core-periphery relations (e.g.
Whittlesey 1944; Shils 1975). Ratzel also injected a cultural dimension into political geography,
noting that the more nations become conscious of global spatial relations, the more they engage
in the struggle for space (Ratzel 1923: 266; Hell 2009). This idea suggested to later geopolitical
thinkers that perceptions of space among political leaders and broader populations should be as
central to analysis as the study of physical space.

The idea that history was driven by a constant international struggle for space had already
been proposed by Ludwig Gumplowicz. Like Ratzel, Gumplowicz resisted thinking of the
hierarchical cultural differences that lay behind states differential success as biological or racial
differences (at least after the 1870s; Weiler 2007). But Gumplowiczs writing abstracted from
the concrete territories in which these eternal struggles were said to be raging, while Ratzel
focused precisely on the spatial aspects of the expansion and contraction, the rise and fall, of
states and empires. Kjellns analysis also hewed closely Ratzel, positing a Law of Healing
(Kjelln 1917: 61) whereby states seek naturally to compensate for the loss of amputated
territories by regaining land. Mackinder (1887: 143) agreed that the communities of men should
be looked on as units in the struggle for existence. Some of the most influential contributions to
the historical sociology of politics in recent decades (e.g. Mann 1986; Tilly 1990) have been
inspired by the military state theories of Ratzel, Gumplowicz (1883, 1909), Hintze (1907), and
Oppenheimer (1919).
Mackinders lasting contribution to this discussion was to focus attention on the globe in
its concrete entirety and to analyze it as a political chessboard. Mackinders model distinguished
between the Eurasian pivot or heartland, surrounded by an inner crescent, which was itself
surrounded by an outer crescent of sea powers (see Figure 3). This model remained influential
for many decades. According to Mackinders famous formula (1942 [1919]: 150):
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

Fairgrieve (1924) redefined the inner crescent as the crush zone, a belt of small buffer states
located between the sea powers and the Eurasian land mass (Figure 5). This approach was
adapted by Spykman (Figure 4), who argued during WWI I that the US had to help Britain in
order to avoid between surrounded by hostile powers on its Pacific and Atlantic rims (Spykman
1942; Parker 1985: 108). Spykman and subsequent geopolitical writers reversed one key aspect
of Mackinders model, however, emphasizing control of the buffer zone or rimland by the
outer world island of sea powers as the key to global political control. Spykmans approach is
often seen as the inspiration for George Kennans containment doctrine. It urged the US to
support, control, and ally with the rimland states in order to contain Soviet expansion (Dodds
2007: 196). As Spykman (1944: 43-44) argued during WWII, the heartland becomes less
important than the rimland and it is the co-operation of British, Russian, and United states land
and sea powers that will control the European littoral and, thereby, the essential power relations
of the world. Trampler (1932) and Cohen (2003) refer to a shatterbelt of eastern european
states, a zone pressed between larger political powers and shattered into numerous small states.
Similarly. Hodder et. al (1997) discuss the problems of landlocked states.
These sorts of classical geopolitical ideas continue to inform the work of American
imperial policymakers (Klare 2001, 2003). A number of post-1945 US foreign policy
frameworks flow at least in part from geopolitical theories, including containment, the iron
curtain, the domino theory, the ideas of the axis of evil and of Old Europe versus New Europe,
and Europe as Venus versus America as Mars (Kagan 2003), and the clash of civilizations
(Huntington 1996). So-called Realism in international relations theory, as Weigert (1942: 734)
observed, is rooted in geopolitics. Contemporary neorealist theorists portray international
relations as a realm of perpetual anarchy in which states attempt to gain as much power as
possible (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer 2001). This approach is strongly reminiscent of classical
geopolitics, even if it has shedded the older biological and geological foundations.
10

Already during the first decades of the 20th century, geopolitical thinking moved away
from environmental determinism and organicist metaphors and toward an understanding of the
ways in which landscape and territory are shaped by politics. Max Weber (1891) analyzed the
spatial layout of roads and properties in the Roman empire, showing that they followed a
primarily political and military logic rather than a natural or economic one. Max Spandau (1925)
argued that political geography encompassed not just transportation and settlement patterns
but even the geography of flora and fauna, since the placement of transportation routes is
often carried out purely according to the standpoint of the state (defense), transfers of population
are or hindered by the will of the state. The Austrian geopolitical thinker Hugo Hassinger
(1923) described the state as a shaper of landscapes (Landschaftsgestalter).
One of the most fundamental contributions of the geopolitical literature has been its
intense focus on colonialism, and also on empires that are non-colonial in the sense of
dominating foreign states indirectly without conquering them, seizing sovereignty, and
governing directly in the place of indigenous populations or elites. Although all of the social
science disciplines have dealt with empires, none of them has made empire the core object of
analysis. This distinguishing feature of geopolitics has sometimes been overlooked by
commentators, however, for at least two reasons. First, geopolitical analysts have themselves
often characterized their field as being centered on the state as the central object of analysis,
downplaying their own fields interst in forms of political organization and strategy located at
levels broader or larger than the individual state. Introductory texts on geopolitics from the
interwar period typically begin with the category of the state rather than empire (e.g. Maull 1925;
Hennig 1928). The second reason for this mischaracterization of the field is that the social
sciences to which geopolitics has been most closely linked have themselves failed to recognize
the importance of empires. Gumplowicz, for example, did not refer to the largest or highest-order
political organizations as empires except when he discussed the United States, which he saw as
seeking today to unify itself with the South American states into a large American Reich
(empire) (Gumplowicz 1910: 157). German state theory from Hegel to Max Weber typically
associated the idea of empire with ancient history and the idea of the state with modernity. This
problem started to be corrected by theorists like Ratzel and Schmitt, but post-1945 American
social science slipped back into the 19th century conflation of modern empires with states.
Skocpol (1979: 47), for example, described and treated Tsarist Russia and Qing China as oldregime states rather than empires, thereby effacing some of the specifically imperial
determinants of the revolutions she was analyzing.
Empires have been central to geopolitical discussions since the beginning of the subfield.
Ratzel discussed colonialism and empires of conquest. A key chapter of Mackinders
Democratic Ideals and Reality concerns the rivalry of empires. Adolf Grabowsky, the leading
representative of geopolitics within Political Science during the Weimar Republic (and the
author of a famous article on the primacy of foreign policy; Grabowsky 1928) wrote a book on
Social imperialism as the last phase of imperialism (1939) while in exile in Switzerland during
the Nazi period. Otto Maull, one of the editors of the Journal of Geopolitics, discussed colonial
geopolitics (Maull 1936: 51-54). Erich Obst, another editor of that journal, specialized in
overseas colonialism. Obst discussed the geopolitical divisions of Africa and deployed the
Grossraum idea to analyze colonial imperialism (Obst 1932, 1941). Even as Haushofer
provided arguments for an imperial invasion of certain parts of eastern Europe, he called for an
anti-imperialist alliance between Germany and Japan, China, Turkey, India, and the USSR
against the powers of the outer ring, which were trying to suppress these countries self11

determination (Jacobsen 1979: 268-269). Geographer Manfred Langhans (1924) discussed the
legal and actual spheres of influence of the great powers, diagnosing an emerging pattern of
informal imperial dominance. Langhans emphasized the usefulness of a geographic approach to
the problem, calling for maps that could convey an accurate picture of the actual political reach
of the various great powers (Murphy 1997: 111). Focusing on US policy in Central America,
Langhans argued that modern statecraft allows the more powerful (ruling) state to impose a
protective relationship over the weaker (protected) state that is in many respects the equivalent of
annexation, while carefully avoiding the appearance of being the actual ruler of the area it
dominates (Langhans 1924; see also Salz 1923: 569).
These models of informal empire were closely tied to German discussions of continental
domination over central Europe. As the liberal imperialist politician Friedrich Naumann had
written in an influential essay on Mitteleuropa, the peripheral states in such a German-dominated
system would have their own life, their own summers and winters, their own culture, worries
and glories, but in the grand world-historical scheme of things they [would] no longer follow
their own laws but instead would work to reinforce the leading group (Naumann [1915] 1964).
During the 1920s these ideas developed into projects for a German dominated Grossraum in the
east (figure 1). The legal theorist Carl Schmitt applied the idea of the Grossraum to imperial
political formations, defining it as a modern approach to empire in which the controlling state
renounces open territorial annexation of the controlled state but absorbs a space far exceeding
the boundaries of the state proper into its own spatial sphere (Schmitt 1950: 252, 281).
During WWII Schmitt began discussing the new American Nomos that he argued would install
itself upon the ruins of the old ones (presumably the British, Soviet, and German Nomoi) after
the war ([1942] 1997: 59). Schmitt also held out the possibility of a combination of several
independent Grorume or blocs that could counterbalance the American and perhaps also the
Soviet Nomos (Schmitt 2003: 355). Geopolitics has thus been a theory of empires and supra-state
political spaces as well as states, regions, and substate politics.
The most important development in the geopolitical literature in the past three decades is
the emergence of several critical schools of geopolitics. Yves Lacoste and the Hrodote group
rejected the pretensions of disinterested and scientific geography and argued that
geopolitics is not just the consideration of planetary-scale superpower strategies but also
involves a form of reasoning that can contribute to anti-hegemonic resistance. There is more
than the geopolitics of raison dtat; there are other forms of geopolitics (Lacoste 1982: 4;
1984). Rather than channeling their work toward ruling politicians, they take a distanced and
skeptical view of the political status quo (Bassin 2004: 621). But these critical geopoliticians do
not necessarily strike an entirely apolitical stance; instead they direct their advice toward social
movements and progressive parties. The central thesis of the Hrodote group was that
geography was a form of strategic and political knowledge, central to military strategy and the
exercise of political power, but that this strategic discourse had become hidden behind the smokescreen of academic geography. Geographers needed to cast off the limitations of their mystified
and mystifying discourse, and become militant and critical analysts of strategy, working to unmask
the geographical structuring of power and assisting in the development of counter-strategies (Dodds
Atkinson 2000: 268).

Lacoste (1993) is interested in contributing to counterhegemonic and democratic movements by

analyzing the ways in which politicians are guided by geopolitical ideas and by offering
alternative ways of visualizing political space. In this respect Lacoste is responding directly to
the geopolitical tradition of visual, especially cartographic, propaganda. Halford Mackinder
attempted to make people think imperially by visualizing global space (Dodds 2007: 121).
12

Karl Haushofer (1928) promoted an evocative new form of cartography, which he labeled the
suggestive map, aimed at a politically emphatic visual message (Hell 2009). Like some of the
Anglophone critical geographers, Lacoste promotes an alternative cartography. During the
Vietnam War Lacoste mapped the US bombing of dikes protecting the rice paddy fields of the
Tonkin River Delta in order to systematically destroy the farming basis of the Vietnamese
economy (Claval 2000: 244). More recently he presented a map of trajectories of postcolonial
immigration into France that reminds viewers of the colonial origins of Frances current
domestic conflicts and that evokes a ghostly memory of older maps of colonial Africa that
depicted the colonies of each European power in a different color (Lacoste 2010: 15).
Lacostes version of geopolitics, like the Anglophone school of critical geopolitics, has
applied geopolitical ideas to new objects and scales of analysis. As Lacoste writes, states do not
have a monopoly on geopolitics (1986, vol., 1, p. xiii). Geopolitics is not only about
international or imperial politics but is also about internal geopolitics within nation states (e.g.
regionalism), urban relations that transcend national boundaries, popular geopolitical and
nationalist discourse, and the construction of the very distinction between the foreign and the
domestic (Foucher 1980). Lacoste suggests analyzing each point in political space at a variety of
different scales (figure 5).
4. Current emphases in work on topic in research, theory and future directions
We can identify at least seven areas of valuable geopolitical research and theory for the
present and the future. The first has to do with continuing to identify the spatial form of evolving
imperial strategies. Geopolitical theory warns against ignoring or de-emphasizing the role of
both states and supra-state (imperial) forms of political domination when theorizing empire (as in
Hart and Negri 2000). The second agenda involves analyzing states and politics as shapers of
space and territory (Brenner 1997), a project that continues the pioneering work of Hassinger and
others from the interwar period. The third involves thinking international relations in terms of
shatterbelts, crushbelts, and other spatial concepts. Fourth, there is a need to continue developing
the dialogue with neohistoricism that existed in German geopolitics before 1933, in order to
resist the idea that such geopolitical relations can be explained by a general theory or that they
are is likely to take a universal form. A fifth, related point is that geopolitics can help resist the
temptations of economic reductionism in social science.
Sixth, geopolitics has a critical and reflexive agenda of understanding, criticizing,
deconstructing, and offering alternatives to official government geopolitical imaginaries.
Explicit, conservative geopolitics continues to flourish in imperial settings like the United States
and post-Soviet Russia, and in new geopolitical formations like the European Union. Whereas
geopolitics had been persistently demonized during the days of the Soviet Union as a heinous
capitalist ideological device and an instrument of military adventurers, a fascist theory in
the service of American (and west german) imperialism, geopolitical discourses returned with
a vengeance in post-Soviet Russia (Erickson 1999: 242). North American imperialists have also
argued that traditional geopolitics should be brought back (Ignatieff 2003: 20). Critical
geopolitics puts us on our vigilance for crude reterritorializations (Taylor and Flint 2000:
103) that try to represent a complex world of massive social and political change in terms of
simple models and concepts.
Finally, insofar as geopolitics refers to discourses and practices concerned with rivalry
among states, empires, or regions over the control of territories and the resources within them, it
provides an important corrective counterpoint to discourses of globalization. As Blouet (2001: 7)
13

writes, globalization usually suggests the opening of national space to the free flow of goods,
capital and ideas, whereas geopolitical policies seek to establish national or imperial control
over space and the resources, routeways, industrial capacity and population the territory
contains. Geopoltics suggests spatial bounding as the necessarily counterpart to spatial
unbounding. The word globalization usually stands for the decline of states, the transnational
circulation of culture, commodities, and people, the disappearance, weakening, or crossing of
borders, and deterritorialization. By contrast, geopolitics emphasizes the continuing power of
states and empires and the importance of power struggles among these entities; borders, lines,
distinctions between cores and peripheries; in short, (re)territorialization (see Clarno 2008;
Brown 2010). There are deep contradictions between the free flows of finance, commodities,
people, and ideas that characterized the post-Fordist era (and globalization) and the tendencies
toward imperial closure that have come to the fore in more recent years, though both are present
and dialectically linked to one another (Steinmetz 2003, 2005a). Rather than seeing an end of
geopolitical practice or of the relevance of geopolitics, we are currently seeing (as in earlier
periods) a rearrangement of the nature and importance of different forms of political closure,
borders, and domination, and a rescaling of geopolitics. As in the 1920s and in earlier periods,
globalization and geopolitics move hand in hand. A more adequate approach to globalization
thinking would integrate it with a geopolitical sense of the strategies being used to create and
strengthen states, empires, and borders, and new forms of enclosure and territorialization.

SEE ALSO: BORDERS, colonialism, core, deterritorialization, empire, flat world, geography of
globalization, globalization, hegemony and counter-hegemony, imperialism, international,
international relations, militarism, military, nationalism, nation-state, periphery, political
globalization, postglobalization, Realism, political, scales of globalization, sovereignty, space,
space of place, war

References
Agnew, John A. 2003. Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics. London: Routledge.
Ancel, Jacques. 1935. Gographie des frontires. Paris: Gallimard.
Balandier, Georges 1956. Le Tiers Monde: sous-dveloppement et changement. Paris : PUF.
Bassin, Mark. 1996. Geopolitics in the Historikerstreit: The Strange Return of Mittellage. Pp.
187-230 in Jost Hermand and James Steakley, eds., Heimat, Nation, Fatherland : The
German Sense of Belonging. New York: P. Lang.
Bassin, Mark. 2003. Politics from Nature. Environment, Ideology, and the Determinist
Tradition. Pp. 13-29 in John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal (Gearid
Tuathail), eds., A Companion to Political Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers.
Bassin, Mark. 2004. The Two Faces of Contemporary Geopolitics. Progress in Human
Geography 28(5): 620-626.
Behrmann, Gnter C. 1998. Die Verselbstndigung der Wissenschaft von der Politik:
Grndung und Begrndung einer neuen Fachwissenschaft. Pp. 443-478 in Karl Acham,
ed., Erkenntnisgewinne, Erkenntnisverluste Kontinuitaten und Diskontinuitten in den
14

Wirtschafts-, Rechts- und Sozialwissenschaften zwischen den 20er und 50er Jahren.
Stuttgart: F. Steiner.
Billeb, Eberhard. 1937. Geopolitische Auswirkungen der Luftfahrt. Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik
14(12): 996-1004.
Bleek, Wilhelm. 2001. Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland. Mnchen: C.H. Beck.
Blouet, Brian W. 2001. Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth
Century. London: Reaktion, 2001.
Boehm, Max Hildebert. 1938. Chronik des deutschen Grrrnzkampfes. Deutsches Grenzland 4:
46-55.
Bowman, Isaiah. 1942. Geography vs. Geopolitics. Geographical Review 32(4): 646-658.
Brenner, Neil. 1997. State Territorial Restructuring and the Production of Spatial Scale: Urban
and Regional Planning in the Federal Republic of Germany, 19601990. Political
Geography 16( 4): 273-306.
Brenner, Neil. 1998. Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization and
the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 16:45981.
Brenner, Neil. 2002. Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and
Western Europe. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Brill, Heinz. 1998. Geopolitik in der Diskussion. Zeitschrift fr Politik 45(2): 205-219.
Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books.
Burchill, Scott and Andrew Linklater, eds. 1996. Theories of International Relations. New
York: St. Martins Press.
Cahnman, Werner J. 2007 [1942]. Methods of Geopolitics. In Werner J. Cahnman, Social
Issues, Geopolitics, and Judaica, edited by Judith T. Marcus and Zoltan Tarr. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Calleo, David P. 1978. The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and the World Order,
1870 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Capel, Horacio 1991. Institutionalization of Geography and Strategies of Change. Pp. 37-69 in
D.R. Stoddart, ed., Geography, Ideology, and Social Concern. Oxford: B. Blackwell.
Christaller, Walter.[1933] 1980. Die zentralen Orte in Sddeutschland.
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Clarno, Andrew. 2008. A Tale of Two Walled Cities: Neo-liberalization and Enclosure in
Johannesburg and Jerusalem. Political Power and Social Theory 19: 161-207.
Claval, Raul. 1999. Hrodote and the French Left. Pp. 239-267 in Klaus J. Dodds and David
Atkinson, eds., Geopolitical Traditions: Critical Histories of Century of Political
Thought. London: Routledge.
Cohen, Saul Bernard. 2003. Geopolitics of the World System. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers.
Collingwood, R.G. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coogan, Peter Francis. 1991. Geopolitics and the Intellectual Origins of Containment. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Cowen, Deborah and Neil Smith. 2010. After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to
Geoeconomics. Antipode 41(1), pp. 2248.
Cox, Kevin R., Murray Low, and Jennifer Robinson. 2007. Political Geography: Traditions and
Turns. Pp. 1- in Kevin R. Cox, Murray Low, and Jennifer Robinson (eds.), The SAGE
Handbook of Political Geography. London: SAGE Publications.
15

Dalby, Simon. 1994. Critical Geopolitics. Pp. 56-58 in John OLoughlin, ed., Dictionary of
Geopolitics. London: Greenwood Press.
Dix, Arthur. 1927. Geopolitik, Lehrkurse ber die geographischen Grundlagen der Weltpolitik
und Weltwirtschaft. Fssen am Lech.
Dix, Arthur. 1929. Wirtschaftsstruktur und Geopolitik. Volkswirtschaftliche Bltter 28: 465484.
Dodds, Klaus. 2007. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dodds, Klaus J. and David Atkinson. 2000. Geopolitical Traditions: Critical Histories of
Century of Political Thought. London: Routledge.
Douzet, Frdrick. 1997. Internet gopolitise le monde. Hrodote 86-87: 222-233.
Ebeling, Frank. 1994. Geopolitik: Karl Haushofer und seine Raumwissenschaft, 1919-1945.
Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Encyclopdia Britannica. N.d. Geopolitics. Retrieved from
http://www.britannica.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/EBchecked/topic/229932/geopolitics
Erikson, John. 1999. Russia will not be trifled with; Geopolitical Facts and Fantasies. Journal
of Strategic Studies 22(2), pp. 242-268.
Fairgrieve, James. 1924. Geography and World Power. London: University of London Press.
Farr, James. 2003. Political Science. Pp. 306-328 in Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds.,
The Modern Social Sciences, 32953, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Febvre, Lucien. 1962. Frontire: le mot et la notion. Pp. 11-24 in Pour une histoire part
entire. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N.
Febvre, Lucien. 2003. A Geographical Introduction to History. London: Kegan Paul.Flanze,
Gnter. 1938. Das Fernsehen im Werdegang des Nachrichtenwesens. Welt-Rundfunk.
Stndige Beilage zur Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik 1(4): 665-667.
Foucher, Michel. 1980. Linvention des frontires. Hrodote 40, pp. 54-88.
Gallois, Pierre M. 1990. Gopolitique. Les voies de la puissance. Paris: Fondation des tudes de
Dfense nationale.
Geddes, Patrick. 1947. Patrick Geddes in India. Edited by Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. London: L.
Humphries.
George, H. B. 1907. Relations of Geography and History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gerth, Hans and C Wright Mills. 1953. Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of
Social Institutions. New York, Harcourt, Brace.
Gilmartin, Mary and Eleonore Kofman. 2004. Critically Feminist Geopolitics. Pp. 113-125 in
Lynn A. Staeheli, Eleonore Kofman, and Linda Peake, eds., Mapping Women, Making
Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography. New York: Routledge.
Golcher, Hans. 1927. Grenzstruktur und staatlicher Organismus. Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik
4(9): 811-819.
Gottmann, Jean. 1952. La politique des tats et leur gographie. Paris, Colin.
Grabowsky, Adolf. 1928. Der Primat der Aussenpolitik. Zeitschrift fr Politik 17
Grabowsky, Adolf. 1939. Der Sozialimperialismus als letzte Etappe des Imperialismus.
Basel: Weltpolitisches Archiv.
Gumplowicz, Ludwig. 1875. Rae und Staat. Eine Untersuchung ber das Gesetz der
Staatenbildung. Wien: Manz.
Gumplowicz, Ludwig. 1883. Der Rassenkampf. Innsbruck: Wagner'sche UniversittsBuchhandlung.
16

Gumplowicz, Ludwig. 1909. Der Rassenkampf. Sociologische Untersuchungen. 2nd edition.

Innsbruck: Wagner'sche Universitts-Buchhandlung.
Gumplowicz, Ludwig. 1910. Sozialphilosophie im Umriss. Innbruck: Wagner'sche UniversittsBuchhandlung.
Gunnell, John G. 1986. Between Philosophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory.
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hartog, Franois. 1978. Hrodote, rhapsode et arpenteur. Hrodote 9 (January-March): 56-65.
Hartshorne, Richard. 1960. Political Geography in the Modern World. The Journal of Conflict
Resolution 4(1): 52-66.
Harvey, David. 1985. The Geopolitics of Capitalism. Pp. 128-163 in Derek Gregory and John
Urry, eds., Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan.
Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hassinger, Hugo. 1932. Der Staat als Landschaftsgestalter. Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik 9 (1932),
pp. 117-122, 182-187.
Haushofer, Karl. 1925. Politische Erdkunde und Geopolitik. Pp. 87-103 in Ludwig Distel and
Edwin Fels, eds., Freie Wege vergleichender Erdkunde. Mnchen: R. Oldenbourg.
Haushofer, Karl. 1927. Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung. Berlin: K.
Vowinckel.
Haushofer, Karl. 1928. Die suggestive Karte. Pp. 343-348 in Karl Haushofer, Erich Obst,
Hermann Lautensach, and Otto Maull, Bausteine zur Geopolitik. Leipzig: Kurt
Vowinckel Verlag.
Haushofer, Karl. [1924] 2002. An English translation and analysis of Major General Karl Ernst
Haushofer's Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean, edited by Lewis A. Tambs. Lewiston,
N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press.
Haushofer, Karl, Erich Obst, Hermann Lautensach, and Otto Maull. 1928. ber die historische
Entwicklung des Begriffs Geopolitik. Pp. 1-26 in Karl Haushofer, Erich Obst, Hermann
Lautensach, and Otto Maull, Bausteine zur Geopolitik. Leipzig: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag.
Heilbron, Johan. 2008. Quest-ce quune tradition nationale en sciences sociales? Revue
dhistoire des sciences humaines 18: 3-16.
Hell. Julia. 2009. Katechon: Carl Schmitts Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future.
Germanic Review 86: 283-326.
Hell, Julia. 2011. Imperial Ruins. Imagining the Decline of Rome from Napoleon to Hitler.
Hennig, Richard.1928. Geopolitik. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner.
Henrickson, Alan K. 1980. The Geographical Mental Maps of American Foreign Policy
Makers. International Political Science Review 1(4): 495-530.
Hepple. 2000. Gopolitiques de gauche. Yves Lacoste, Hrodote and French Radical
Geopolitics. Pp. 268-300 in Klaus J. Dodds and David Atkinson, eds., Geopolitical
Traditions: Critical Histories of Century of Political Thought. London: Routledge.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. [1784] 1985. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit.
Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag.
Hintze, Otto. 1970 [1907]. Imperialismus und Weltpolitik. Pp. 457-469 in Gesammelte
Abhandlungen, vol. 1, 3rd ed. Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Hochholzer, Hans. 1930. Zur Geopolitik des Flugverkehrs. Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik 7(3): 243254.
Hodder, Dick, et. al. 1997. Land-locked states of Africa and Asia. London: Frank Cass.
17

Howard, Michael. 1994. The World according to Henry: From Metternich to Me. Foreign
Affairs 73(3): 132140.
Hzel, Emil. 1896. Das geographische Individuum bei Karl Ritter und seine Bedeutung fr den
Begriff des Naturgebietes und der Naturgrenze. Geographische Zeitschrift 2, pp. 378396, 433-444.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
London : Vintage.
Jacobsen, Hans Adolf. 1979. Karl Haushofer, Leben und Werk. 2 vols. Boppard am Rhein: H.
Boldt.
Jay, Peter. 1979. Regionalism as Geopolitics. Foreign Affairs 58(3): 485-514.
Johnson, Chalmers A. 2004. The Sorrows of Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Johnston, R.J. 2000. The Dictionary of Human Geography. 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Kagan, Robert. 2003. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kearns, G. 1984. Closed space and political practice: Frederick Jackson Turner and Halford
Mackinder. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2(1) 23-34.
Kissinger, Henry. 1979. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown.
Kissinger, Henry. 1994. Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Kjelln, Rudolf. 1917. Der Staat als Lebensform. 2nd ed. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
Klare, Michael. 2003. The New Geopolitics. Monthly Review (July-August): 51-56.
Klare, Michael T. 2001. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. New
York: Metropolitan Books.
Klingemann, Carsten. 1996. Soziologie im Dritten Reich. Baden-Baden: Nomos
Verlagsgesellschaft.
Kristof, Ladis K. 1961. The Origins and Evolution of Geopolitics. The Journal of Conflict
Resolution 4(1): 15-51.
Lacoste, Yves. 1982. Editorial: dautres gopolitiques. Hrodote 28, pp. 3-9.
Lacoste, Yves. 1982. La gographie, a sert, dabord, faire la guerre. 3rd ed. Paris: La
Dcouverte.
Lacoste, Yves, ed. 1986. Gopolitiques des rgions franaises. 3 vols. Paris: Fayard.
Lacoste, Yves. 1993. Prambule. Pp. 1-35 in Yves Lacoste, ed., Dictionnaire de gopolitique.
Paris: Flammarion.
Lacoste, Yves. 2003. Mondialisation et gopolitique. Hrodote 108, pp. 3-6.
Lacoste, Yves. 2010. La question post-coloniale: une analyse gopolitique. Paris: Fayard.
Lange, Karl. 1965. Der Terminus Lebensraum in Hitlers Mein Kampf. Vierteljahrshefte fr
Zeitgeschichte 13(4): 426437.
Langhans, Manfred. 1924. Rechtliche und tatschliche Machtbereiche der Grossmchte nach
dem Weltkriege. Petermanns Mitteilungen 70(1-2): 1-7.
Livingstone, David N. 1993. The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a
Contested Enterprise. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Loesch, Karl C. von. 1922. Die Grenzfrage. Pp. 261-265 in Moeller van den Bruck, Heinrich
von Gleichen and Max Hildebert Boehm, eds., Die Neue Front. Berlin: Gebrder Paetel.
Mackinder, Halford John. 1887. On the Scope and Methods of Geography. Proceedings of the
Royal Geographical Society 9(3): 141-174.
18

Mackinder, Halford John. 1904. The Geographical Pivot of History. The Geographical
Journal 23(4): 421-437.
Mackinder, Halford John. [1919] 1942. Democratic Ideals and Reality. New York: H. Holt and
company.
Mamadouh, V. D. 1998. Geopolitics in the Nineties: One Flag, many Meanings. GeoJournal
46: 237253.
Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1: A History of Power from the
Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. Historicism. In Karl Mannheim, Essays in the Sociology of
Knowledge, edited by Paul Kecskemeti. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 84-133.
Maull, Otto. 1925. Politische Geographie. Berlin: Gebrder Borntraeger/
Maull, Otto. 1926. Politische Geographie und Geopolitik. Geographischer Anzeiger 27: 245253.
Maull, Otto. 1936. Das Wesen der Geopolitik. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner.
Mearsheimer, John J. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton.
Meier, Ernst-Christoph Ernst-Christoph, Richard Rossmanith, and Heinz-Uwe Schfer, eds.
2005. Wrterbuch zur Sicherheitspolitik: Deutschland in einem vernderten
internationalen Umfeld. 5th ed. Hamburg: E.S. Mittler.
Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, baron de. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Moreau Defarges, Philippe. 2008. La gopolitique pour les nuls. Paris: Editions Gnrales First.
Murphy, A. B. 2007. Geographys Place in Higher Education in the United States. Journal of
Geography in Higher Education 31(1): 121-141.
Murphy, Alexander B., et. al. 2004. Is there a Future to Geopolitics? Progress in Human
Geography 28(5), pp. 619-640.
Murphy, David Thomas. 1997. The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany,
1918-1933. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press.
Naumann, Friedrich. 1964 [1915]. Mitteleuropa. In Naumann, Werke, Vol. 4, ed. Theodor
Schieder. Kln and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag
Neumann, Sigmund. 1943. Fashions in Space. Foreign Affairs 21: 276-288.
Tuathail, Gearid. 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Obst, Erich. 1932. Afrika. Pp. 263-365 in Karl Haushofer, ed., Jenseits der Grossmchte.
Leipzig: b. G. Teubner.
Obst, Erich. 1941. Die Groraum-Idee in der Vergangenheit und als tragender politischer
Gedanke unserer Zeit. Breslau: Wilh. Gottl. Korn Verlag.
Oppenheimer, Franz. 1919. Der Staat. Vol. 14-15 in series Die Gesellschaft, edited by Martin
Buber. Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt Rtten & Loening.
Parker, Geoffrey. 1985. Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century.
London: Croom Helm.
Peet, Richard. 1985. The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 75(3): 309-333.
Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto. [1968] 1981. Introduction to Geopolitics. Santiago de Chile: Editorial
Andres Bello.

19

Pl, Bernhard. 2001. Social Sciences in der Ordnungspolitik der USA: vom Kriegseinsatz zum
Medium amerikanischer Kulturpolitik im Nachkriegsdeutschland, 1941-1957. Jahrbuch
fr Soziologiegeschichte 1997-1998, pp. 195-214.
Pounds, Norman. 1963. Political Geography. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Przeworski, Adam and Henry Teune. 1970. The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New
York: Wiley.
Raffestin, C. 1974. lments pour une problematique des rgions frontalires. LEspace
gographique 3(1): 12-18.
Ratzel, Friedrich. 1882. Anthropo-Geographie, oder Grundzge der Anwendung der Erdkunde
auf die Geschichte. 2 vols. Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn.
Ratzel, Friedrich. 1897. Studies in Political Areas: The Political Territory in Relation to Earth
and Continent. American Journal of Sociology 3(3): 297-313.
Ratzel, Friedrich. [1897]1923. Politische Geographie, 3rd edition. Mnchen: R. Oldenbourg.
Ratzel, Friedrich. [1896]1969.The Law of the Spatial Growth of States. Pp. 17-28 in Roger E.
Kasperson and Julian V. Minghi, eds., The Structure of Political Geography. Chicago:
Aldine Pub. Co.
Ritter, Carl. 1834. Ueber das historische Element in der geographischen Wissenschaft. Berlin:
Kniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Ritter, Carl. 1862. Allgemeine Erdkunde. Vorlesungen an der Universitt zu Berlin, H. A.
Daniel, ed. Berlin: Reimer.
Robic, Marie-Claire. 2003. Geography. Pp. 379-390 in Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross,
eds., The Modern Social Sciences, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salz, Arthur. 1923. Der Imperialismus der Vereinigten Staaten. Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft
und Sozialpolitik 50: 565-616.
Schmitt, Carl. [1942] 1991. Volkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot fur
raumfremde Machte. 4th ed. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Schmitt, Carl. [1950] 2003. The Nomos of the Earth. New York: Telos Press.
Sempa, Francis P. 2002. Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction
Publishers.
Semple, Ellen Churchill. 1911. Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzels
System of Anthropo-Geography. New York: H. Holt.
Shils, Edward. 1975. Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slater, David. 2004. Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations.
Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.
Smith, Neil. 2003. American Empire: Roosevelts Geographer and the Prelude to
Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Spandau, Max. 1925. Staat und Boden. Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik 2, pp. 37-45, 108-119.
Spykman, Nicholas John. 1942. Americas Strategy in World Politics. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and company.
Spykman, Nicholas John. 1944. The Geography of the Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Steinmetz, George. 2003. The State of Emergency and the New American Imperialism: Toward
an Authoritarian Post-Fordism. Public Culture 15(2), pp. 323-346.
20

Steinmetz, George. 2005a. Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Theoretical and
Historical Perspective. Sociological Theory 23(4), pp. 339-367.
Steinmetz, George. 2005b. Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The
Plausibility of Positivism in American Sociology since 1945. Pp. 275-323 in George
Steinmetz., ed., The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its
Epistemological Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Steinmetz, George. 2005c. Positivism and its Others in the Social Sciences. Introduction to
The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological
Others, edited by George Steinmetz. Duke University Press, pp. 1-56.
Steinmetz, George. 2010a. Charles Tilly, historicism, and the critical realist philosophy of
science. American Sociologist 41(4), pp. 312-336.
Steinmetz, George. 2010b. Ideas in Exile: Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Failure to
Transplant Historical Sociology into the United States. International Journal of Politics,
Culture, and Society 23(1): 1-27.
Steinmetz, George. 2011. Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology. Cultural Sociology
vol. 11, issue 1 (2011), pp. 45-66.
Strausz-Hup, Robert. 1943. Its Smart to be Geopolitical. Saturday Review of Literature Feb.
4: 4-5, 20-21.
Taylor, Peter J. and Colin Flint. 2000. Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and
Locality. 4th ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall.
Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 9901990. Cambridge:
Blackwell.
Trampler, Kurt. 1932. Die Staaten der europischen Schtterzone. Pp. 186-216 in Karl
Haushofer, ed., Jenseits der Grossmchte. Leipzig: b. G. Teubner.
Tunander, Ola. 2008. Geopolitics of the North: Geopolitik of the Weak. A Post-Cold War
Return to Rudolf Kjelln. Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International
Studies Association 43(2): 164184.
Vidal de la Blache, P. 1923. The Personality of France. London: Christophers.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World Systems Analysis. An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Waltz, Kenneth Neal. 1979. Theory of International Politics. New York: Random House.
Weber, Alfred. 1929. Alfred Webers Theory of the Location of Industries. Chicago : The mode
of University of Chicago Press.
Weber, Max. 1891. Die rmische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung fr das Staats- und
Privatrecht. Stuttgart: F. Enke.
Weigert, Hans W. and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, eds. Compass of the World. A Symposium on
Political Geography. New York: Macmillan.
Weigert, Hans W. 1942. Haushofer and the Pacific. Foreign Affairs 20: 732-742.
Weiler, Bernd. 2007. Gumplowicz, Ludwig (18381909). Pp. 2038-2040 in George Ritzer, ed.,
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
Wenke, Hans. 1937. Rundfunk und Geopolitik. Zeitschrift fr Geopolitik 10(12):888-893.
Whittlesey, Derwent. 1944. The Earth and the State; A Study of Political Geography. New
York: H. Holt.
Wittfogel, K. A. 1929. Geopolitik, geographischer Materialismus und Marxismus. Unter dem
Banner des Marxismus 3(3): 17-51.

21

Worsley, Peter. 1984. The Three Worlds:Culture and World Development. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
Wucher, Waldemar. 1935. Mitttel der Darstellung. Volk und Reich 11 (Beiheft 2): 69-105.
Zitelmann, Rainer, Karlheinz Weissmann, and Michael Grossheim, eds. 1993.
Westbindung: Chancen und Risiken fr Deutschland. Frankfurt/M: Propylen.
Zoppo, Ciro E. and Charles Zorgbibe, eds. 1983. On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear.
Dordrecht: Nijhoff.

FIGURES

Figure 1: The Central European great economic space (from Wucher 1935: 82)

22

Figure 2: Map of German ethnic space and cultural space (Volksboden and Kulturboden), showing the
extension of those spaces beyond the German state borders before 1933 (from Loesch 1925, facing p. 72)

Figure 3: Mackinders map of the world, showing pivot area, inner crescent, and outer or insular crescent
(from Mackinder 1994: 435)

23

Figure 4: Spykmans map of American encirclement of the old world pivot area through alliances with
inner crescent (Europe, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Adsia, and East Asia) (from Spykman 1942:
180)

Figure 5: Fairgrieves map of the world system, showing crush zone (Fairgrieve 1924: 334)

24

Figure 6: Lacoste (1985: 73): Different levels or scales of spatial analysis

25